For in-universe game play. Journey through both familiar and foreign settings, explore lost ruins and forgotten cities, and try to bring light to the darkness of the world... or, you know, blow stuff up. Either way.

[OOC: OK, let me tee up Khoo for an eventual adventure ... and it's going to be two for the price of one.]

Khoo wore a disconsolate look as he waited for Professor Takatsuka in the outer office, while the door to his advisor's inner office remained closed. He'd lost many of his belongings in the wreckage of the Tower of Artifex, and whatever insurance Sashi Mu offered its students, coverage of losses due to an airship running into one's apartment apparently wasn't included. Worse, he obviously wasn't going back to a job at a restaurant that had dissolved into that wreckage. The stipend that he still got from the outreach program might be barely enough to live on, if he didn't mind doing it in an apartment about twice the size of his bathtub and eating magically prepared hash three meals a day.

It was therefore with regret, but no doubt, that he'd responded to a message from Takatsuka that there was an opportunity for part-time work "that applies your expertise to a problem in national security." He knew full well what that meant. It was no big secret around Sashi Mu that Takatsuka, like many other faculty members, got part of his funding from "black" programs, although the accountants were always careful to scrub the money so that nobody was sure what parts of the budget were from those program and which weren't. Khoo had no particular objection to spending that money in its own right, but he'd learned from his classmates that publication of papers resulting from it could be, as the euphemism went, "complicated." That was bad for students like Khoo who hoped that their publication records would set them up for a faculty slot after they completed their advanced degrees. Well, maybe "part-time work" could be separated from his real research cleanly enough to keep that from being a problem. Of course, his experiences of the last week or two hadn't done much for his sense of optimism.

The professor emerged from his inner office, and without further ado, launched into the job description as though Khoo had already agreed to do it, as he might as well have. "This really does fit nicely with your thesis project," the older man said. "They are interested in evaluating security and safety systems on the national airship fleet and at terminals world wide." (Just as I feared, thought Khoo; that might lead to trouble with the patent rights for his magical glider escape system, and he'd been told that he stood to make a bundle of tsuis off those, not that he had any idea what to do with them.) "You will have some travel to international destinations in low-profile circumstances, to do data gathering." (In other words, being a spy, thought Khoo, with an element of paranoia, but not altogether inaccurately.) And then came the crusher. "The program is a three-way collaboration, between government, academia, and private industry. You will be working with a young intern from our industrial partner."